Book 3.4: The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Author: Stephen Chbosky
Dates read: July 30, 2011 - August 3, 2011 (5 days)
Pages: 213
Genre: Fiction

This was a much quicker read than my last, and had I not been pretty busy while I was reading it, I probably would’ve been done with it even quicker. My roommate loaned it to me a while back when I was about to travel because she thought it might be a good read for the plane, but like a jerk I completely forgot about it until randomly coming across it on my desk months later and going, “Shoot, I was gonna read this ages ago.”

This novel chronicles an introverted boy’s journey through high school through a series of letters he writes to an unknown person. The letters read almost like diary entries in which he examines not just the strange events of his teenage life, but moreso the strange feelings all of his forced growing up brings about.

There’s something beautiful about the way this short book manages to evoke so much of the emotional experience of growing up. It’s never precious about the protagonist’s feelings or the things he goes through, and I think this is the main factor in the great ease of relating to this book despite the protagonist being more socially awkward and (as you really only discover near the very end) damaged than most teenagers I knew when I was his age. And though a specific trauma is revealed near the conclusion that was very affecting and sheds an entirely new light on everything that preceded it, most of my impression of this book is just a remembrance of how emotionally raw you can be as a teenager. The book is meditative without pretension, the kind of thing that seems like a good novel to pick up in autumn if, like me, you find yourself remembering every fall the feeling of returning to school despite having been done with it for years.